Original Poem: Winter

Came across this while looking through the archives this week. Can’t believe this is twelve years old already. This is the only thing of mine ever published — in the spring 2006 edition of Italics, Mine at SUNY Purchase.

Winter

Occasionally, at night,
it’s fun to travel — hips swinging
through the hallways,
twisting as they do
through space.

I love to walk outside in the dead of
Winter, sparse snow sprinkling the ground,
ice levitated over the pavement, half melted along the
sexy curb line, the outline of what used to be
a thin, hard stream of reliability.

Occasionally, as I say,
I can amble along for long
moments. The smell of ice
is like nothing else I know; ice on the ground
brings power, maybe the blood factor,
I’ve always found ice to smell peculiarly
like blood, those vertebral forces.

I love to hear that crunch crunch sound ice makes
under my soles,
sound only resonates
this way in winter: it’s so quiet,
everyone is locked away, folded up
like contortionists in boxes, filling
closets, affecting comfort.

Everything is so acute, sometimes
I feel sick with it, razorblade cold in my ears.
We’re so damned close to everything — the
stars, the trees, the pavement and ice
melting, dripping then
under white round beads of salt.

I feel like opening my legs and straddling it all,
the moon and the long streets filled with
running water and small rocks,
the little bits of snow.

I’d like to absorb them all this way;
hug them momentarily in this rude
fashion, struggling to keep them all in-
I’m a single mother with seven grocery bags.

It’s not enough to inhale so deeply
your head becomes sore with it, your lungs
like iron or fat hospital rubber.
I need to go home and sleep in my
own bed, find out why winter is
necessary for recognition.